Book by Book (7 page)

“I had fallen so low,” writes the young Englishman in Nikos Kazantzakis' novel
Zorba the Greek
,“that if I had had to choose between falling in love with a woman and reading a book about love, I should have chosen the book.” This sounds pitiful— happily, the young scholar soon changes his ways—and yet love and writing seem always to have gone together, hand in hand. Even now, the starry-eyed frequently find themselves composing sonnets and buying little volumes of Sappho and Rumi. Our earliest
Greek poet, Archilochos, sighed like any adolescent, “If only it were my fortune just to touch Neoboule's hand.”

At the same time books have caused lovers no end of trouble. Paolo and Francesca, bound together in Dante's Hell, fell into adultery over the story of the illicit affair between Sir Lancelot and Guinevere: “That day we read no further.” Emma Bovary, in Flaubert's novel, might never have strayed from her dull husband were it not for those dreamy romances she devoured when young. And has any man ever lived up to the ideal of Jane Austen's Darcy or Emily Brontë's Heathcliff ?

Imagine a yearlong seminar on everyone's favorite emotion. Which poems, stories, and plays should be on the syllabus? And why? Here, in roughly chronological order, are some of the masterworks in the literature of love.

Sappho, poetic fragments. The great celebrant of “Eros, the bittersweet.”

Eros make me shiver again
Strengthless in the knees,
Eros gall and honey,
Snake-sly, invincible.
—Sappho (translated by Guy Davenport)

Plato,
The Symposium.
In this most beautiful of Plato's dialogues, a group of friends drinks the night away as they discuss the nature of love. Two ideas about Eros, often much simplified, have proved especially influential: Aristophanes claims that human beings were once round ball-like creatures that the gods divided in two. Each of us is in restless search of his or her missing half. In his turn, Socrates tells us that he learned from a wise woman named Dio-tima about a “ladder of love.” We typically begin by desiring the physically beautiful, but we should then ascend through stages of increasing spirituality to a contemplation of the transcendentally beautiful, good, and true. Such is the origin of the concept of “platonic love.”

Catullus, Horace, Ovid—selected poems. Three classic celebrants of physical desire, jealousy, and suffering. Catullus famously pleads with his beloved for “a thousand kisses, then a hundred, another thousand next, another hundred.” The moderate epicurean Horace reminds us that life is short and we must live for the moment,
“carpe diem”
—seize the day. Ovid's
Amores
chronicles jealousy and sadism; his
Ars Amatoria
discusses love's “techniques,” from flirtation to quite explicit sexual positions.

Courtly love. Inspired by Arabic poetry, the cult of the Virgin Mary, and the necessary feudal obeisance to the lady of a castle when her lord was away on crusade, courtly love softened and feminized men's sexual conduct. As most of this
amour courtois
was adulterous—a marriage being primarily a business arrangement
between families—the aspirant to a lady's favor had to prove his worthiness. He must be a “parfit, gentil knyght” (Chaucer's phrase) or demonstrate an unwavering devotion. One troubadour poet worshiped a woman he had never seen, only heard about. Andreas Castellanus even formulated the exacting rules of “the art of courtly love”; for example, the properly infatuated should always turn pale in the presence of his lady.

The classic introduction to twelfth-century Provencal poetry—the heart of the courtly love tradition—is Ezra Pound's enthusiastic (if sometimes historically inaccurate)
The Spirit of Romance.
The most provocative analysis, and critique, of the courtly love tradition remains Denis de Rougemont's influential
Love in the Western World.
“Happy love,” laments de Rougemont, “has no history—in European literature. . . . Unless the course of love is being hindered there is no romance; and it is romance that we revel in—that is to say, the self-consciousness, intensity, variations, and delays of passion.”

The tales of King Arthur. The Arthurian cycle describes nearly every sort of love, from raw desire to spiritual transcendence. Indeed, the story of Tristan and Isolde manages to blend them, an alchemy best experienced in the glorious music of Wagner's opera. (Mothers in the late nineteenth century refused to allow their daughters to listen to Isolde's ecstatic
Liebestod
, or love-death; there was no mistaking what those crescendos were emulating.) The student of literary love should read at least parts of Thomas Malory's saga of the “once and future king,”
Le Morte D'Arthur.
The fullest account of Tristan is that by Gottfried von
Strassburg, while for Perceval and his quest for the Holy Grail one needs to turn to the
Parzival
of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the supreme masterpiece of Middle High German literature. Still, for a single sampling of courtly love, the best choice is probably Chrétien de Troyes's
Lancelot: Or, The Knight of the Cart.

In this verse-romance, Chrétien de Troyes relates how Queen Guinevere is spirited away to the mysterious land of Gorre, and Sir Lancelot naturally gallops off to her rescue. Early on he loses his horse but happens upon a dwarf with a cart, really a tumbril intended to convey criminals to the gallows. The dwarf tells the knight that if he wants to see Guinevere again he should climb onto the cart. Lancelot hesitates for a moment, then does so, even though he feels deeply ashamed to be viewed by the mocking populace in such a disgraceful vehicle. Eventually, after crossing a sword bridge and enduring much suffering, Lancelot reaches Guinevere, who treats him with cold disdain. The poor fellow is mystified. By this point, he's undergone ordeal after ordeal for this woman. Could any lover have shown himself more faithful? Finally, Guinevere explains. She had been locked in a high tower and could observe Lancelot when he encountered the dwarf. So? Didn't he get into the cart of shame? Yes, Guinevere tells him, but anyone who claimed to love her would not have hesitated for even a moment. It is a long time before Lancelot is restored to the queen's good graces.

Love in the Renaissance. The spiritualization of woman reaches its zenith in Dante's adoration of Beatrice, first in his
Vita Nuova
(“The New Life”), later in
The Divine Comedy
, and then in
Petrarch's influential poems about Laura. In both cases, the poets worshiped their (married) lady from afar until she died young, and then they sang her praises in their poetry. Petrarch, in particular, inaugurated a European craze for sonnet sequences addressed to idealized women.

Still, by the sixteenth century the depiction of love was gradually growing less improbably spiritual and more human. Shakespeare's sonnets chronicle a complex entanglement, almost a ménage à trois, among two men and a woman. In France the essayist Montaigne was once asked why he so loved his deceased friend Etienne de la Beotie. His answer is probably the most sensible ever given to this perennial question: “If you pressed me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than it was because he was he and I was L”

And then in the songs and sonnets of John Donne we finally hear a voice that sounds as urgent and real as our own. “For God's sake, hold your tongue and let me love!” Donne can be delightedly bawdy in the notorious poem commonly called “On His Mistress Going to Bed”: “Licence my roving hands, and let them go, / Before, behind, between, above, below. / O my America, my new-found-land!” Or amorously philosophical, as in “The Ex-tasie”: “Love's mysteries in soule's doe grow, / But yet the body is his booke.” The unexpurgated carpe diem theme would be fully exploited by the seventeenth-century Cavalier poets, especially the earl of Rochester and Sir John Suckling, though its most famous touchstone is certainly Andrew Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress.” Every line has passed into the vocabulary of seduction, from the opening “Had we but world enough and time” to the
famous summarizing couplet, midway through the poem: “The grave's a fine and private place / But none I think do there embrace.”

Such blunt truths about life and sex would find their most expert analyst in the French aristocrat, La Rochefoucauld, who gazed unflinchingly at the behavior of men and women, then recorded what he saw in steely maxims. “There are few good women who do not tire of their role.” “There are successful marriages, but no blissful ones.” “What keeps lovers and mistresses from tiring of being together is that they talk of nothing but themselves.”

Make me chaste . . . but not just yet.—Saint Augustine

Twinned helplessness / Against the huge tug of procreation. —Robert Graves

The principal sin . .. with which the tongue is particularly connected is lust, for, since the days of Eve and the serpent. . . seduction lies in talk, and the tongue is seduction's tool.—Marina Warner

She was only a singularly handsome girl, looking up at him with a shy questioning yet almost trustful air. His good resolutions suddenly broke down. Soon the world and its inhabitants seemed nothing to him, nor would he have stretched out a hand to save them from instant destruction.—Murasaki Shikubu

. . . The rites

In which love's beauteous empress most delights,
Are banquets, Doric music, midnight revel,
Plays, masques, and all that stern age counteth evil.
—Christopher Marlowe

The hind that would be mated to the lion / Must die for love. —William Shakespeare

The pleasure of love lies in loving, and our own sensations make us happier than those we inspire.—La Rochefoucauld

Nothing sharpens the wits like promiscuous flirtation. —George Moore

I don't think I shall ever meet with so delicious an armful again. —Robert Burns

We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes

which has no speech; to
go to bed with you, to pass beyond
the moment of meeting, while the
currents float still in mid-air, to
fall—
with you from the brink, before
the crash—

to seize the moment.
—William Carlos Williams

I love being in love with you. It makes even unhappiness seem no bigger than a pin, even at the times when I wish so violently that I could give my heart to science and be rid of it.—James Schuyler

Humphrey Bogart was “so contemptuous of other men's needs to publicize their amorous triumphs that he refused to notice them. Being supremely confident of his own attractiveness to women, he scorned every form of demonstrativeness. When a woman appealed to him, he waited for her the way the flame waits for the moth.”—Louise Brooks

The immediate tactility, the electric curiosity that bodies have for each other: that is real. It is a fuel that keeps one benign and going, something to make the world expand no matter that one day the same world will abruptly contract to measure six feet by two. To say Again in a kerosene-scented room in Egypt is, at that moment, to have made no bad choices and not to have failed. —James Hamilton-Paterson

I thought you would most likely be rather amused, rather touched, by my importunity. I thought you would take a listless
advantage, make a plaything of me—the diversion of a few idle hours in summer, and then, when you had tired of me, would cast me aside, forget me, break my heart. I desired nothing better than that. That is what I must have been vaguely hoping for. —Max Beerbohm (from
Zuleika Dobson).

. . . and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. —James Joyce (the closing lines of
Ulysses)

The poet Ezra Pound, interred at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the insane, once told the critic Hugh Kenner, “Sometimes the guards come to me, for a piece of verse to give their sweethearts.” “And do you write it?” asked Kenner. “Oh, yes,” answered Pound. —Ezra Pound to Hugh Kenner

Stendhal,
On Love.
In
De I'amour
the novelist Stendhal tabulates the psychological impulses behind every aspect of Eros (not excluding unexpected “failure” or impotence). The most celebrated chapters analyze what happens when we fall in love. A bare branch, Stendhal tells us, may be left in the depths of a salt mine,
and after a few months it will be covered with “shimmering, glittering diamonds, so that the original bough is no longer recognizable.” A similar “crystallization,” he says, forms around an adored mistress, to whom our minds attribute every beauty and perfection. A young woman may appear quite ordinary to the world's eyes, but to the man in her thrall even her little tics and whimsies are suddenly bathed in a celestial light.

In Steven Millhauser's “An Adventure of Don Juan” (from
The King in the Tree: Three Novellas)
, Don Juan—much to his surprise— actually falls in love with a young Englishwoman named Georgiana. “At night, lying restlessly awake, he posed questions to himself that seemed crucial and unanswerable.... If you were allowed one night of bliss in the arms of Georgiana, followed immediately by banishment, or a lifetime of chaste friendship, which would you choose? If you were permitted to ravish Georgiana night after night for the next ten years with the knowledge that she despised you, or to leave tomorrow with the knowledge that she loved you passionately, which would you choose?” Millhauser superbly evokes the agonies of desire—“continual agitation and anxious brooding modified by moments of uncertain hope.” Finally, one night Don Juan vows to act. “For love,” he tells himself, “is not a sad man sitting under a tree, but a raging sword flashing with blood and fire.”